The invention concerns a patient positioning and transport system with a transportable stretcher and a cart for transporting the stretcher along with the patient, wherein the stretcher can be removed from the cart and be disposed on a diagnosis or treatment station.
The underlying problem of the invention concerns the fact that different diagnosis or treatment stations each have their own stretchers. Patients who must be diagnosed and treated sequentially at several stations must be positioned onto the stretchers of those stations and back onto the transport cart. Conventional carts may have stretchers which can be removed from the cart and placed onto an operation table. This however, does not solve the problems involved when different diagnosis or treatment stations of different construction must be visited which do not permit disposition of the above-mentioned stretcher.
In particular, many stations must often be passed for stereotactic diagnoses and treatment. The treatment region must usually be initially defined using an imaging device, i.e. computer tomography, e.g. with radiographs, or magnetic resonance imaging (also called nuclear magnetic resonance tomography). This is often followed by angiography for detecting the position of the blood vessels. Therapy is started following stereotactic therapy planning which, for its part, may require hours to evaluated the detected data and plan therapy in three-dimensional space. Operations must be carried out with high spatial precision. Treatments of this type include e.g. radiation, removal of biopsies, introduction of radioactive seeds, laser treatment etc. These diagnosis and treatment processes are often one-time proccedures and the spatial conditions of diagnosis must be reproducible with high accuracy using image monitoring up to the operation in order to ensure that diseased tissue can be precisely treated by the therapy while healthy tissue is protected. If the treatment regions are close to sensitive tissues such as the spinal cord, nerves etc. the required accuracy is often in the millimeter region. Towards this end, bearing and positioning systems were developed having shells which are adapted to the body or with a head ring which is fixed to the head via holding stops and optionally fixed to bones such as spinal vertebrae. These positioning systems thereby have a fixed relationship to the corresponding body part and have their own markings which are detected to provide coincidence of positions for therapy.
For diagnosis and treatment in several stations, repositionings of the patient are time-consuming and tiring for the patient and the staff, and also involve the risk that a positioning system changes its location relative to the corresponding body part, thereby losing the fixed calibrating relationship. In this case, the positioning system would have to be refixed and the entire procedure, starting with imaging, must be repeated. It would be even worse if such a positioning error went unnoticed, since spatial inaccuracies endanger the success of the therapy and could cause damage to the patient.
It is therefore the underlying purpose of the present invention to develop a patient positioning and transport system which substantially avoids patient repositionings between individual diagnosis or treatment stations.
This object is achieved for a patient positioning and transport system of the above-mentioned type in that the stretcher has at least one associated adaptor plate, wherein the stretcher, the adapter plate and the cart can be connected to each other and are designed such that the stretcher can be moved along with the patient from the cart to various structurally different diagnosis and treatment stations, and back.